A key focus of this blog is the history of Jacksons in Ireland. I am specially curious about those who may be related to Sir Thomas Jackson (1841-1915). His life is key to understanding how a dozen or so young men, sons of Irish tenant farmers, shaped the future of international banking in the Far East in the late 1800s. I also use this blog as a place for playful posts: book and restaurant reviews, recipes, and events in my life. WARNING: Note the date of each post. Some may be outdated.

Search This Blog

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Every Monday morning, reliable as clockwork, a homeless man
named Matt used to walk for an hour and a half into Blythe to receive a pre-arranged
phone call at the hospital. These calls were from my friend Kinga. Last Monday,
October 24th, Matt didn’t show up. This was alarming because he hadn’t
shown up on the previous Monday either. Inside his mailbox, is an uncollected
letter. It contains $20.00 American currency. For years, Kinga has regularly mailed him such
letters. They mean the world to him.

Their friendship began in 2004 when Kinga had first discovered
online poker. Matt was one of the regulars at a table of players, like her, who
played for small-stakes bets. The two of them shared a sense of humour, an innate
curiosity about all manner of things, and a sparkling intelligence. Eventually,
they started emailing two or three times a week. Just chat. They had each
other’s phone numbers, but rarely phoned. Once when I was visiting, I had picked
up the phone, and it was Matt. He had a warm voice. I don’t recall what we
talked about.

Three years later, in 2007, because Matt had gone several days
without answering an email, Kinga got worried. She phoned and got no response.
Since she knew that his mother lived nearby, she then phoned every person in
the vicinity with the same surname. The eighth person on her list turned out to
be Matt’s mother.

That day in 2007, when the police arrived, they had to knock
down Matt’s locked door to get in. They found him, unconscious, lying on the
floor, his elbows abraded from repeated attempts to get up. The medics told his
mother not to hold out hope, such was the evident extent of his brain damage.
And yet he lived. A few days later, Kinga took a plane from her home in
Vancouver, BC to stay by his bedside and to support his recovery.

At first he could not talk, write, or walk, and yet, in
time, he could. After a few weeks of intensive therapy, Kinga took him back home
to the modest house that he owned. She cooked, and cleaned, and even found his
computer passwords for him. Those who know Kinga would find none of this surprising,
except maybe that bit about being able to help with the computer.

This photo of a photo was done in poor lighting – but we were rushed
and wanting to get the word out. Even so, it shows the beauty of Matt’s soul as
he sleeps.

As he recovered, she encouraged him to step out of the
cocoon of his house, first to sit on the front stoop, and then to walk the length
of the block. One evening, they simply sat there and watched the road in front
of them as it turned golden from the glow of the setting sun. Each day, they
took short walks, and then longer walks. When he was well enough, she stocked
his kitchen with healthy food, before returning home to her own family in Vancouver.
Their emails and letters continued as before. In one of his, he remarked on the
intense blue of a flower seen in an unexpected place. Another one repeated snatches
of an overheard conversation. He was re-entering life.

In about 2008 or 2009, Matt, along with thousands of other Americans that
year, lost his house to the bank. With his mother recently deceased, and with no
other ties to his hometown, he headed west with eighty dollars and a bus ticket
in his pocket. Unfortunately, after that, one downward spiral morphed into
another downward spiral. He has now been homeless for several years.

Items contained in letters to Kinga. Special K; a coin; a bag of sand from one of the
places where he stayed, a note of promises that he made to himself, and a Queen
of Hearts. Also, nearly every letter also included a dry flower – all kinds and
colours.

Eventually, as he moved further south, he ended up in Blythe,
a place where it was at least warm enough to survive a winter. Throughout all
of his downward spirals, times when his bike, his sleeping bag, and even his
food have been stolen, Kinga’s letters have been his one and only connection to
anyone who cared.

Letters from Kinga. Each envelope includes a self-addressed envelope and some paper, an
American twenty-dollar bill, and a little chat about the news in Kinga’s life.
Books she has read. Plays she has attended. Whatever she has been thinking
about. She has the envelopes shown here already addressed, and ready to send.

Kinga fears the worst, not that he is dead – because she has
already accepted the likelihood of that kind of worst - but that it may turn
out that he is barely alive and slowly dying. If anyone can find him, it would
give her some measure of peace. If she could travel there herself, she would,
but for now, she can’t. Here’s hoping that perhaps this can bridge the gap.

Here is a map of where he was last known to be: NESTat
Highway 95 and Intake Road. Canal # D10. The nest was hollowed into low bushes
and was sort of like a cave. Kinga recently sent him some mosquito netting. It
is still likely to be hanging in this cave.

This map shows where he would be on the days that he walked
into Blythe.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Last August, when Marina Endicott, Madeleine Thien, and
Alissa York were at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, they not only read from their own novels, but also attended most of the readings given by other writers. Often, as they took their seats in the audience, I couldn't help but notice their shared playfulness and vitality. I hope they will forgive me, but it made me think of a song:

Filled to the brim with girlish glee …

Three little maids who, all unwary
Come from a ladies' seminary
Freed from its genius tutelary
Three little maids from school

The Mikado.First performed in 1885

A book review is a bit like a selfie of the reader and writer, two
heads tilted towards each other, touching but separate. Every reader, including
myself, transforms the book by the way they read it. These days, my reading is
shaped by my obsessive curiosity about inter-generational echoes. How much of each
of us is mutable, and how much is not? And going in a different direction, how
much of us is universal? After all, Joseph Campbell’s and Carl Jung’s notions
of the collective unconscious are getting a second look thanks to the latest
research in epigenetics.

In Do Not Say We Have
Nothing, one of Madeleine Thien's characters, a mathematician, notes how much our
experiences of time, and space and heredity are shaped both by our language and our culture:

In English, consciousness and
unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓
asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to
wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ←.
Meanwhile, time itself is vertical, so that last year is “the year above” ↑ and
next year is “the year below” ↓. The day before yesterday [前天]
is the day “in front” ↑ and the day after tomorrow [後天] is the day behind ↓.
This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones
behind [*]. Therefore, to look into the future,
one must turn around, a mirroring echo of Walter Benjamin’s famous evocation of
the angel of history, “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to
which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”.
How we map time how it becomes lived and three-dimensional to us, how time is
bent and elastic and repeated, has informed all my research, proofs and
equations.

* I
could not find a digital equivalent of the symbol Thien used here.

Her novel includes a story-within-a-story, in this case, a book called The Book of
Records. It is a manuscript which has been copied by several generations, over
and over again, and then left by the copyists in places where it can be found by those people who need to inherit it.
Like DNA, the slight mutations in the copying live on. The lineage of each previous
version is contained in the next, and these changes give us clues about who the previous
copyists were, and where they might be found.

My reading of Thien, York
and Endicott was also influenced by my recent reading of: The Gene: An Intimate
History. Books tend to seep into one another when I read several of them at the same time..

In the book above, Siddhartha Mukherjee posits that there were three very different,
but profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas which shaped the 20th
century. They included: the atom, the byte and the gene. As he notes:

Each is foreshadowed by an earlier
century, but dazzles into full prominence in the 20th. Each begins
its life as a rather abstract scientific concept, but grows to invade multiple
human discourses thereby transforming culture, society, politics, and language.
But the most crucial parallel between the three ideas, by far, is conceptual:
each represents the irreducible unit – the building block, the basic
organizational unit – of a larger whole: the atom, of matter; the byte (or bit)
of digitized information; the gene, of heredity and biological information.

An example of this 19th century foreshadowing is played out in The Naturalist. The two trips that Alissa York’s characters took down the Amazon’s Rio Negro bracketed,
both intellectually and chronologically, the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This was a time when
naturalists were still mucking about in the inter-tidal zone at the intersection of theology
and biology. As they
sailed down the Rio Negro, encountering all sorts of turtles, snakes, birds,
and insects, several of them wondered – each in their own way - how much shape-shifting
between species was possible. What about evolution? Why was the anaconda so
big? Was it the same kind of snake that had tempted us in Paradise? Are we the
anaconda?

One of the characters, Paul Ashe, was born to an American
naturalist and his first wife, a member of one of the native families whose
houses were scattered along the shores of the Rio Negro. This meant that he was
genetically both a white American and an Amazonian native. After his mother
died, as a result of giving birth to him, he lived with her extended family until he and his
father left. Culturally, he was then raised as an American. And yet? Like the
characters in Thien's book seeking out The Book
of Records, Paul constantly rereads the diaries that his father had written during the 1844 trip. In doing so, something that he had resisted knowing finally dawns on him. He is as much connected to his mother’s family as to his father’s. When he comes to a passage, written by his father twenty-three years earlier, he reflects on what it
might mean: In light of her condition,
all but Zuleica herself had judged it wise that she remain at home.

Her
condition – which is to say, Paul. He lifts his gaze from the small circle
of lamplight. That’s him in there, breathing his mother’s blood, helplessly
holding her back. You can see her standing on the dark, watching the Santa Carolina round the headland out of
sight. Her sister is already climbing the bank, but Zuleica lingers, hands on
her belly, eyes on the last grey billow of the galliota’s sail.

As Paul has to rest while he heals from an injury to his foot, even more questions begin to surface, questions that only his mother’s sister can answer. How did he
survive the death of his mother? How was he fed as an infant? The answers to
these questions reveal that he also belongs to her more than he could have imagined, and could not have survived without her.

And like Paul, Hugh, the central character in Endicott’s
novel, Close to Hugh, was also a
grown man who had an absent mother. Unlike Paul's, Hugh's mother had not died in
childbirth, but she had been away for long periods of time thanks to frequent bouts of mental illness. Ruth, a neighbour who took in foster children, some of whom remained his life-long friends, became Hugh's second mother.

The first time he was sent to live
with her, four years old, confused, he thought they said to call her Aunt
Truth. Newell, waiting with him, waiting for their mothers to come back: two
boys side by side at the long white table, watching Ruth laugh as she stood
stirring at the stove, laughing at something Jasper said. Jasper flirting in
his peacock shirt, gesturing with his glass – he didn’t even drink too much,
back then. When was that? 1969. Warm and safe in Ruth’s foster-kitchen, those
boys, backs against fake ivy-covered bricks on washed clean vinyl wallpaper.
Ivy in pots too, growing, growing, shining green, kind and clean.

The generational tribes in Endicott’s fictionalized southern
Ontario town are just as much shaped by the impact of the byte, as they are by the reality of the gene. Endicott explores the ways in which social media, email, and twitter messages can fray our shared social fabric, but also knit it back together. Her book's structure echoes the fragmentation and discontinuity of our digital world. As Karl Marx says: History repeats itself, first as
tragedy, second as farce. In this farce-like life, her
characters are caught up in a perverse game of snakes and ladders. Up
and Down. Forward and Back. Of course, word-play being what it is in this novel,
Hugh is saved by Ivy – the woman not the wallpaper. But it couldn’t have
happened had Hugh not first fallen down a ladder, and then scaled a ladder, and
then finally risked love long after he had long thought – not without reason -that it had passed him by.

We are living in an age when the question of how individual heredity shapes cultures, politics, science and art, as well as individual lives, are being explored at new depths by scientists. There will be consequences to what they find. Our beliefs about ourselves, which we now know are inherited through a mix of both nature and nurture, do have the power to change how we view our own lives and the lives of others, and also how we judge ourselves and others and how we interpret our personal and national stories. And because our personal experiences and beliefs can leave epigenetic markers on our individual DNA, the effects of them, like the effects of these three books, have the potential to influence the futures of generations to come.

What else to say? Not much. After all, I am no expert when it comes to all of this. Maybe this post is simply my way of saying thank you for three novels, thank you for three exceptional women, and thank you for the ways that each one of them have changed me.

About Me

Author And Researcher. I am currently writing a book on the life of Sir Thomas Jackson. He was the son of tenant farmers, born just before the Famine in South Armagh, who was knighted because he not only lead HSBC into the 20th Century, but was also responsible for assisting with the funding of much of the economic development in China & Japan in the late 1800s. My first published book was "Some Become Flowers: Living with Dying at Home".